Shifting Liveness – Assignment One (Part One)

PART ONE

“Write a short blog post investigating how a television program (live or taped) uses its social media channels to interact with and facilitate audience participation during broadcast, or how these programs use live-stream options to draw audiences in (eg. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert using Facebook Live for ‘Tea for Tuesdays’)”

The era of reality has no set of dying down – with some shows that have been running for years or just popped up (Married at First Sight…), individuals have different opinions on reality tv and ‘trash tv’ and why it is so addictive. Keeping Up with The Kardashians has been running since 2007 and has just wrapped up Season Fourteen. Not only are all the girls active on social media (they are all social media starts themselves) but they all actively share their lives on social media through Instagram live, promoting the show and giving fans an extra insight into behind the scenes. The importance of social media is to increase ratings to the show (ratings = $$$) but also so fan’s can tune-in to their every move before tuning into the show. The Kardashians (and the Jenner’s) were the first adopters of social media streaming such as intstagram live, snapchat and twitter. Not only doe KUWTK follow the lives of the girls, they have also been made a public spectacle through memes and social interactions that extend beyond the show, thus, people follow them on social media and in turn: tune into the show. They don’t have to tune into the show to follow the girls on social media, but the show is inevitably plugged throughout all their socials (including instagram stories) – showing these girls influence not only from a show perspective but from a social media perspective too.